Thursday, June 13, 2013

Shalom Bollywood coming to a screen near you

Shalom Bollywood: the untold story of Indian cinema is a feature length
documentary about India's Jewish film stars, told in the style and feel of a Bollywood film. Its Australian director Danny Ben-Moshe has spent six years assembling information for his film. He claims it will
'reveal the unknown history of India’s tiny 2000 year old Indian Jewish (Bene Israel) community' . But several female superstars are from the 'white' Baghdadi Jewish community, who migrated to India as recently as the 19th century (with thanks: Gavin).

The film website says: "When Indian cinema began 100 years ago it was taboo for Hindu and
Islamic women to perform on screen, so female roles were played by men –
sort of Monty Python or Shakespearian style. While the conservative
nature of Hindu and Muslim societies shunned the notion of female
performers, the Jewish community was more liberal and educated and
willing to embrace the exciting new medium of film. The fact that Indian
Jews were a lighter shade of brown made these women seem all the more
suited for celluloid. However, because of their stage names people
thought they were Muslims.

"The story is told through the glamorous and often tumultuous lives of
the famed Jewish actresses who, from the earliest days of Silent film
through to the end of the twentieth century, passed the cinema queen
baton onto each other and shaped what was to become the world’s largest
film industry."

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)